Just as water pollution is a monumental issue in environmental awareness, air pollution is also a major issue that affects us every time we take a breath. Air is another quantity that I believe many people consider infinite, since there is so much or it and it surrounds us at all times. However this is not true, our air supply is limited and dwindling more and more every day. We must ensure that we work to protect the air supply we have instead of continually pumping it full of pollutants.
Just from my own limited knowledge, I would think that one of the biggest issues with air pollution is that it seems almost inevitable that everything we create, including chemicals or pollutants, will come into contact with our air. Air is all around us, how are we to prevent something from reaching something so ubiquitous? The air seems to be sensitive to all sorts of processes-both natural and unnatural, from the methane being released by cows to fuel combustion, to spray paints and dry cleaning. These all release harmful toxins into the air that pollute it and make it unsafe for us. How are we to avoid all of these processes? Fuel combustion can release a number of chemicals into the air including nitrous oxides and HS, or even CO when it is incomplete. Yet we cannot not expect people to forgo driving their cars. Air pollution coincides with processes that have great instrumental value. Another problem with air pollution is that it is more harmful when the toxin particles are smaller than PM 2.5, rather than when the pollution is larger in size. The larger particles are caught by the nose and prevented from entering the lungs, while the smaller particles are able to slip through the body’s natural defenses. This presents a problem because the smaller particles, the harder it is to filter them out from the air by artificial means and the harder it is to notice the particles before it is too late. Air pollution seems to be filled serious issues that may prove difficult to solve.
I was very interested by the study conducted in central park, determining whether or not gasoline use was the source of increased atmospheric lead. To determine the decrease in lead over the course of the 20th century they drilled a core of sediment out of the bottom of the lake in central park. They divided the sample into 2 cm segments and had each segment represent a period in time, starting in the late 1800s. I thought it was especially clever how they determine which segment represented which years based off of what they found in the sample. The used the levels of cesium they found to indicate that those samples represented the years 1954 to 1963, when nuclear testing began to when the ban on testing was enacted. The results of this test showed that lead levels decreases while lead gasoline was still in use, showing that this was not the case. This test also shows how air pollution is can affect all other parts of the environment. Lead in the air is able to enter the lake in central park, and settle as sediment to the bottom. The cesium found in the lake is a result of nuclear testing in a different region of the country. Pollution to one part of the environment has far reaching consequences to other areas.
Air pollution is a serious problem that is hard to fix. The quote by Richardo Navarro, “In our free enterprise economy, the benefits are privatized but the costs of pollution are socialized” truly describes the state of environmental ethics today. It is difficult to enact programs to benefit the environment when the benefits of pollution go directly to the company that is polluting while the consequences are shared by everyone and left for the government to deal with. This is especially true of air pollution which is a product of so many of the processes which we consider to be essential to our lives.
